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When Henry Fauntleroy, a gentleman fraudster, was hanged at Newgate in 1824, the crowd was estimated at 100,000. If a smart promoter like Barry Hearn (above) had been alive then, he’d have hired Michael Buffer to say, “Let’s get ready to haaaaaaaaaaaaaaang . . .” and get a half-naked dolly bird to hold up notices between executions.
The violent professional sports lobby reacts violently to criticism, like the US gun lobby. They say “the fighters want to do it. It is their escape from the ghetto. Their means of expression.” When the young Welsh boxer Johnny Owen died in the ring, Hugh McIlvanney, one of those great writers who like Norman Mailer mythologises fighting, said, “It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a violent language”. As though nothing could have been done about it. He was fucking dead, Hugh. Dead! Do you comprehend what that means? For him. For his family.
The fact that there are young men with violent tendencies who are prepared to put themselves on the line is neither here nor there. As a young fighter said in RTé’s recent documentary on MMA: “I like to hurt people.” Put it this way. If an American hedge fund millionaire started ‘Ultimate Combat’, where the fighters use weapons and the battle is to the death, he’d have a queue of men wanting to sign up.
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SD: Of course there are inherent dangers in MMA, but there are such dangers present in many sports throughout the world. Just because these dangers are also a big point of the entertainment factor, shouldn’t mean MMA is banned.
They could sign consent forms. He could put them in an amphitheatre and he would most certainly fill it to overflowing. Come to think of it, that’s already been done. In Ancient Rome. And didn’t it work brilliantly? The new sport would sweep the planet. We’d all be glued to our screens. PPVs would break all records. Young men would die. But hey, it’s their tragedy if they find themselves articulate in such a dangerous language.
The promoters would become richer than Trump. The fighters would mostly die, or be disabled, or die in poverty. Just like they do now. They would take to crime and drugs, or alcohol, like Jermain Taylor, or Kelly Pavlik, or Riddick Bowe, or Mike Tyson, or Arturo Gatti or so many other ex-world champions. And that’s the cream.
The truth is that violent sports are a rich man’s play thing, where poor men try to put each other into a coma for our amusement. When Joe Frazier took on George Foreman (pictured above in action against Ali) in Jamaica, promoter Don King drove to the fight in Frazier’s cavalcade, sitting with the champ in his vast limo. Foreman knocked Frazier out and when he got back to his dressing room, the new champion was warmly embraced by King. When Foreman’s cavalcade pulled out to return to the hotel, King sat beside him. An example of switching limos mid-stream.
These violent life-and-death sports are fun. They bring us to somewhere primitive inside us. It is why the spectators in the Colosseum gasped and cheered as the knife was thrust home. Or why the toffs on the balcony at Newgate paid big money to watch the hangman pull the lever. It is why young, penniless men are queueing up to try to murder each other in cages and boxing rings. And why Conor McGregor high fives and beats his chest as a young man dies.
It’s not the fighters’ fault. Nor the referees’. Nor the promoters’. Nor the audiences’. The law permits it. And it shouldn’t. Time to ban these violent pro sports. Sometimes, human beings have to be protected from themselves.
